Stalin, Volume 1
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316. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 16. Many Latvian units had been sent to the Volga valley.
317. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 294 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 2, d. 1098, l. 2).
318. Vatsetis, “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 40–1. He claimed the fighting lasted seven hours, from 5:00 a.m. until noon, but this is highly improbable. See also Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, I: 201–4 (Sablin).
319. Valdis Berzins, “Pervyi glavkom i ego rukopis,” Daugava, 1980, no. 2–5 (Vacietis memoirs from 1919); V. D. Bonch-Bruevich—I. V. Stalinu,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 4: 199–201.
320. Leggett, The Cheka, 70–83; Steinberg, “The Events of July 1918,” 21–2 (citing Lacis); Steinberg, Spiridonova, 216.
321. Izvestiia, July 8, 1918. Even now, one on-site Latvian commander reported that many of his compatriots thought the Bolsheviks’ days were numbered. Swain, “Vacietis,” 77 (citing Latvian State Archives, f. 45, op. 3, d. 11, l. 3).
322. Chudaev, “Bor’ba Komunisticheskoi partii za uprochnenie Sovetskoi vlasti,” 177–226. Dzierzynski had resigned as head of the Cheka the day he was freed (July 7). Unusually, the resignation was announced in all the newspapers and posted throughout the capital. He was replaced, at least formally, by Jekabs Peterss, an ethnic Latvian, a founding member of the Cheka, and the man who had retaken the Lubyanka headquarters from the Left SR–controlled Combat Detachment. (Peterss soon bragged to a newspaper, “I am not at all as bloodthirsty as people think.”) Dzierzynski remained in Moscow over the summer, however, and the extent to which he ceded authority remains unclear. On August 22, he would be formally reinstated as Cheka head. Tsvigun, V. I. Lenin i VChK, 69, 83; Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine [1969], 316; Utro Moskvy, November 4, 1918. See also Peters, “Vospominaniia o rabote v VChK.” MChK, 77–79; Leggett, The Cheka, 251. The episode of Dzierzynski’s resignation was described, murkily, in Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK. As late as June 1919, almost a year after the Left SR party’s debacle, the Moscow City Cheka confirmed two former Left SRs to its collegium, the highest decision-making body. MChK, 154.
323. Blium, Za kulisami “ministerstva pravdy,” 34.
324. Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 715; Izvestiia, July 14, 1918: 4. Popov was sentenced to death in absentia; he was captured only in 1921. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 145–56 (Popov: TsA FSB, d. N-963, l. 50–5).
325. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 108–28; Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/i: 451–76; Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 266–74. See also Zinoviev and Trotskii, O miatezhe levykh s.r.; and Erde, “Azef i Azefshchina,” Izvestiia, July 9, 1918. Vacietis, too, would maintain that the Left SRs had attempted a coup but simply failed to act decisively: “Grazhdanskaia voina: 1918 god,” 19.
326. Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 99 (Efretov: TsA FSB, D. n-8, t. 1, l. 177); Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 294, 443, n48 (citing TsA FSB, no. N-8, vol. Ia: 58, and RGALI SPb, f. 63, op. 1, d. 4, l. 155 [Proshyan]); Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 122–3; PSS, XXIII: 554–6; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 148–55. Proshyan eluded capture but soon died of typhus in a provincial hospital under a false passport. Lenin wrote him an obituary! Litvin, Levye esery i VChK, 14; PSS, XXXVII: 385.
327. Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 129–30, 186; Hafner, “The Assassination of Count Mirbach,” Piatyi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 132, 208; Pravda, July 9, 1918: 1, 3; Izvestiia, July 10, 1918: 5. Pyotr Smidovich understood it was not a coup in real time: Izvestiia, July 8, 1918: 5. The Left SRs would also assassinate the German commander in chief in Ukraine (on July 30, 1918).
328. V Vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov, 109.
329. Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy (1977), x.
330. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 305. Spiridonova blamed herself for the debacle. Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 308 (citing TsA FSB, no. N-685, vol. 6, l. 35ob) (letter of Spiridonova from prison to the Left SR 4th Party Congress); Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, 200–1.
331. Paquet, Im kommunistischen Russland, 26. See also Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 467.
332. Znamia truda, April 19, 1918. “We are against war, and we do not encourage the nation to resume war,” Spiridonova had said at the 3rd Left SR Party Congress in June 1918. “We demand that the Peace Treaty be torn to pieces.” Quoted in Vladimirova, “Levye esery,” 113.
333. During the confused Left SR melee, Kurt Riezler telegrammed Berlin predicting that “Through immediate ruthless action and good organization, the Bolsheviks will maintain the upper hand and, unless their own troops fail, be once again successful.” Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 388. Under Stalin, Spiridonova would be re-arrested in Ufa in 1937, while in exile, along with a dozen other Left SRs. The NKVD shot her and a large group in a forest outside Oryol Prison in September 1941 as the Wehrmacht approached.
334. The Bolshevik and former Bundist S. M. Nakhimson wrote to the party secretariat in June 1918 (one month before he was killed in the Left SR uprising in Yaroslavl), that “All soviet and other institutions are only auxiliary organs for the party.” Nakhimson had presided over a “trial” against the Mensheviks and SRs in Yaroslavl already in April 1918. D. B. Pavlov, Bol’shevistskaia diktatura, 3 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 4, d. 91, l. 24); I. Rybal’skii, “Iaroslavskii proletaroiat na slam’e podsudimykh,” Vpered!, April 25, 1918; G. B. Rabinovich, “Kto sudit iaroslavskikh rabochikh (otkrytoe pis’mo),” Vpered!, April 27, 1918.
335. Bykov, Poslednie dni Romanovykh, 121; Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 266; Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grand-Ducs; Crawford and Crawford, Michael and Natasha, 356–61; Ioffe, Revoliutsiia i sud’ba Romanovykh, ch. 8. The murder was spearheaded by Gavriil Myasnikov, who would be expelled from the Communist party in 1921 and arrested in 1923 for belonging to the party’s Workers opposition. Mikhail Romanov’s son Georgy (Count Brasov) had been smuggled out of Russia; he died in 1931, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, in a car crash. Mikhail’s wife Natalia Brasova died a pauper in a Parisian charity hospital in 1952.
336. George V worried that the deposed autocrat’s presence in Britain would render the house of Windsor unpopular. Rose, King George V, 211–5.
337. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 745–88; Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 169–376.
338. Steinberg, Spiridonova, 195; Vechernii chas, January 12, 1918; Nashe slovo, April 13, 1918; Sovetskaia Rossiia, July 12, 1987, 4 (G. Ioffe).
339. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 763 (citing Trotsky’s diary [April 9, 1935], Trotsky archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS/Russ 13, T-3731, p. 110).
340. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 257n (citing Chicago Daily News, June 23, 1920: 2 [quoting the diary of Empress Alexandra]). The book was found among the possessions of Alexandra in Yekaterinburg: Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 281.
341. The key original documents, with analysis, can be found in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 287–93, 310–5, 351–66.
342. No order to kill from Lenin or Sverdlov has come to light. Second-hand reports, the strongest being Trotsky’s diary entry, indicate that Lenin and Sverdlov ordered the murders. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 770 (citing Trotsky’s diary [April 9, 1935], Trotsky archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS/Russ 13, T-3731, p. iii). The local order to murder Nicholas II was issued the very day Sverdlov reported on the deed at the Council of People’s Commissars. GARF, f. R-130, op. 2, d. 2 (Sovnarkom meeting, July 17, 1918). After the European press prematurely reported on the execution of the ex-tsar, Lenin wrote a cable in English: “Rumor not true ex-Tsar safe all rumors are only lie of capitalist press Lenin.” A few hours later, Nicholas was killed. Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 47.
343. Izvestiia, July 19, 1918; Pravda, July 19, 1918; Dekrety, III: 22.
344. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 522
. “Order would be re-established and these fantastic socialist ideas would be done away with,” the former tsarist prime minister Kokovtsov, who found himself in Kislovodsk, recalled. “The Volunteer Army was being formed, and rumors persisted that the country was to be saved from Bolshevik oppression. . . . Nothing certain was known, and everybody made the most incredible conjectures, such that the Germans were advancing to save Kisolovodsk. The Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna”—wife of the third son of Alexander II—“told me in all seriousness that she expected a train to come and take her to Petrograd, where everything was ready for a restoration of the old order.” Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 496.
345. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 654–5.
346. Chicherin, Two Years of Soviet Foreign Policy, 15–17.
347. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 244; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 252–3; Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 42–3.
348. Pamiat’, 1979, no. 2: 43–4; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 112–3.
349. Some six months later, an investigation began in earnest: the Whites captured one of the former guards and dug up a great number of royal family artifacts. Their chief investigator, Nikolai Sokolov, with the help of cryptographers, established the fact and the uncommon brutality of the entire royal family’s demise. Sokolov, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i, 247–53. See also Bulygin, Murder of the Romanovs; Mel’gunov, Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II; Bruce Lockhart, British Agent, 303–4; Radzinsky, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i; and Rappaport, Last Days of the Romanovs.
350. “Nonetheless,” Lenin assured Zetkin, “we firmly believe that we will avoid the ‘usual’ course of revolution (as happened in 1794 and 1849) and triumph over the bourgeoisie.” Leninskii sbornik, XXI: 249 (July 26, 1918).
351. Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 49–52. See also Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, I: 128 (citing conversations with Chicherin).
352. Viktor Bortnevski, “White Intelligence and Counter-intelligence,” 16–7; Makintsian, Krasnaia kniga VChK, II: 120; Bortnevskii and Varustina, “A. A. Borman,” I: 115–49 (at 139).
353. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 237–8; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 656.
354. Paquet, Im kommunistischen Russland, 54.
355. Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, no. 128, box 1, file 9: Karl Helfferich, “Moia Moskovskaia missiia,” 17; Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 392–4; Brovkin, Mensheviks After October, 272. Helfferich spent all of nine days in Moscow before being recalled by the foreign ministry.
356. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 660–1; Helfferich, Der Weltkrieg, III: 653; PSS, L: 134–5; Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 108–10; Erdmann, Kurt Riezler, 472n; G. Chicherin, “Lenin i vneshniaia politika,” Mirovaia politika v 1924 godu (Moscow, 1925), 5; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 23–4.
357. Chicherin, Vneshniaia politika Sovetskoi Rossii za dva goda, 5; Pearce, How Haig Saved Lenin, 71; Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 436.
358. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, I: 467; “Geheimzusatze zum Brest-Litowsker Vertrag,” Europaische Gesprache, 4 (1926): 148–53; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 664–5.
359. In the letter, dated August 21, 1918, to Vatslav Vorovsky in Sweden, Lenin added, falsely, that “No one asked the Germans for help, but there were negotiations on when and how they, the Germans, could carry out their plan to attack Murmansk and General Alexeev.” Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxiii; RGASPI, f. 2, op. 2, d. 122, l. 1.
360. Jarausch, “Cooperation or Intervention?,” 394.
361. Meijer, Trotsky Papers, I: 117. The Reds recaptured Kazan in early September 1918.
362. Savel’ev, V pervyi god velikogo oktiabria, 109.
363. Service, Spies and Commissars, ch. 9 (citing a memorandum by Stephen Alley given to the author by Andrew Cook). Alley, a British agent in Russia, returned to England in March 1918, where he was eventually transferred to MI5. He has also been suspected of conspiring in the murder of Rasputin. He had a Caucasus connection: before the 1917 revolutions, he had helped build the Black Sea oil pipeline.
364. Zubov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 187.
365. PSS, XXXVII: 83–5 (Izvestiia, September 1, 1918); Bonch-Bruevich, Pokushenie na Lenina.
366. Kostin, Vystrel v serdtse revoliutsii, 84. The substitute speaker for Lenin was the leftist V. Osinsky [Obolensky], an opponent of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
367. Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochinenii, III: 275–90.
368. RGASPI, f. 4, op. 1, d. 91, l. 1–3 (receipts included).
369. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 209.
370. Bonch-Bruevich, Tri pokusheniie na V. I. Lenina, 79–80.
371. Gil’, Shest’ let s V. I. Leninym, 23–4.
372. Golinkov, Krushenie antisovetskogo podpol’ia v SSSR, I: 188–90.
373. Orlov, “Mif o Fanni Kaplan,” 70–1; Fanni Kaplan; Leskov, Okhota na vozhdei, 75. Kaplan confessed under interrogation by Peterss. Konopleva was not implicated and joined the Communist party in 1921; she was shot in 1937.
374. Izvestiia, August 31, 1918: 1.
375. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 109, d. 18, l. 3–5 (and to frontline commanders: l. 6–13).
376. Trotskii, “O ranenom,” in O Lenine, 151–6.
377. Izvestiia, September 4, 1918; Malkov, Reminiscences, 177–80; Mal’kov, Zapiski [1959], 160; Fischer, Life of Lenin, 282. The 1959 edition of Zapiski komendanta Moskovskog Kremlia is the only one to contain the detail of Kaplan’s incineration. Istochnik, 1993, no. 2: 73.
378. Because of their experiences in Soviet Russia, the Latvian Rifles, upon being repatriated, refrained from defending the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, formed in January 1919 and overthrown in May. Swain, “The Disillusioning.”
379. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, 315–6; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 661–2.
380. Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine [1965], 376–81.
381. PSS, L: 182; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 67. The first stone monument to Karl Marx was erected only on May 1, 1920. Krasnaia Moskva, 568–9 (plate between pages).
382. By 1922, more than 200 streets would be renamed. Pegov, Imena moskovskikh ulits.
383. Lev Nikulin, in Beliaev, Mikhail Kol’tsov, 162; Dimitriev, Sovetskii tsirk, 29; Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 114; Tsirk. In 1920, Staniewski returned to his native Poland (then an independent country). Radunski soon followed him, but in 1925 he returned to the Soviet Union and reestablished Bim-Bom with a new Bim.
384. Zinov’ev, N. Lenin, 64.
385. Gil’, Shest’ let s V. I. Leninym, 27–8; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 90.
386. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, III: 291–2 (September 5, 1918); Bunyan, Intervention, 239.
387. Izvestiia, September 7, 1918: 3.
388. Berberova, Zheleznaia zhenshchina, 93. “The least opposition, the least movement among White Guards, should be met with wholesale executions,” wrote the interior affairs commissar (Petrovsky) in a directive. “Local provincial executive committees should take the initiative and set the example.” Ezhenedel’nik chrezvychainykh komissii po bor’be s kontr-revoliutsiei i spekulatsiei, September 22, 1918: 11.
389. Izvestiia, September 3, 1918: 1. See also Krasnaia gazeta, September 1, 1918.
390. Vatlin, “Panika,” 78–81.
391. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 453; Daniels, “The Bolshevik Gamble,” 334, 339.
CHAPTER 8: CLASS WAR AND A PARTY-STATE
1. Petr Struve, “Razmyshleniia o russkoi revoliutsii,” Russkaia mysl’, 1921, no. 1–2: 6 (November 1919).
2. Protokoly zasedanii Vserossiiskogo, 80. See also Trotskii, “O voennykh kommissarakh” [fall 1918], in Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, I: 183–4.
3. Goulder, “Stalinism.” State-building has long been recognized as a principal outcome of the Russian civil war, but the specificity
of that state has not been as sharply recognized. Moshe Lewin, “The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 399–423; Moshe Lewin, “The Social Background of Stalinism,” in Tucker, Stalinism, 111–36 (at 116).
4. The Bolsheviks complained about their own propaganda’s ineffectiveness and confinement to the towns. Kenez, Birth of the Propaganda State 44–9, 53–6.
5. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States; Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 169–91.
6. One scholar correctly wrote that “the civil war gave the new regime a baptism by fire. But it was a baptism the Bolsheviks and Lenin seemed to want.” Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76 (at 74).
7. Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76.
8. PSS, XXXVIII: 137–8.
9. As one scholar correctly observed, the Petrograd coup “became a nation-wide revolution only through years of civil war.” Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 176–180. Another scholar has argued that the “specific forms and methods of exercising power [during revolutions] differ greatly from those practiced during ‘normal’ times,” which is true, but in the Russian revolution emergency rule was permanently institutionalized. Kolonitskii, “Anti-Bourgeois Propaganda.”